Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far eastern states, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and the liberty, would lay 216 hold of her at such times with rude power, making her feel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-topped buttes and ramparts of riven stone.
Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as she remembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a great lake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the misty horizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough struggle that lay ahead.
Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor.
“You’ve got to keep your nerve,” he advised, bluntly kind, “and not let the lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton.”
“The lonesomeness?” she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase.
“It’s a disease,” Smith proceeded, “and I suppose you git it anywhere; but you git it harder here. I’ve seen men take it, and turn gray and lose their minds, runnin’ sheep. After you once git over it you’re broke. You wouldn’t leave this country for a purty on a chain.”
“I hope I’ll not get it,” she laughed. “How do people act when they take the lonesomeness?”
“Well, some acts one way and some acts another,” said Smith. “Some mopes and run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about ‘God’s country’ till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn’t as much God’s country as any place you can name! It’s all His’n when you come down to the p’int, I reckon. 217 But how a woman acts when she takes it I can’t so much say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed a man.”
“Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?”
“Well, I don’t know but you could say she did. You see she married a sheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there on the side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while he went off foolin’ around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. I tell you when you git sheep on the brain you don’t eat at home more than once in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin’ tails off of lambs, and all such fool things as that.”